Google’s Legalize Love Campaign – A Fight For Equal Rights Across the Globe

When SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) threatened the freedom of online matters, Google stepped up to the plate with a small but widely noticed protest. Now, Google is taking an entirely new semi-political stance.

Saturday, July 7, 2012, Google announced its global ‘Legalize Love Campaign.’ What this initiative is attempting to do is create a safe work environment in all countries for the entire LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community.

As an international company, Google wants to protect their employees that live in countries with laws against homosexuality.

“We want our employees who are gay or lesbian or transgender to have the same experience outside the office as they do in the office,” Google executive Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe said at the Global LGBT Workplace Summit in London. “It is obviously a very ambitious piece of work.”

However, people can’t help but wonder how exactly Google plans to tackle such a massive chore.

Fortune 500 company Google is building alliances with other international companies who agree to create a safe and comfortable environment for all LGBT employees. Already signed up for this task are companies Citigroup and Ernst & Young.

While people are fighting constantly in the United States for equal rights for homosexuals, it is easy to forget that we hold much more freedom within our LGBT community than most countries. Singapore, for example, has a law that any male found to have engaged in homosexual activities can be imprisoned for up to two years.

Google’s goal is to make it so that people are free to love who they want, despite where they live.

Earlier reports stated that Google’s main disposition was to have all countries legalize same-sex marriage. A Google spokesperson, however, called that inaccurate.

In 2008, Google also spoke out against California’s Proposition 8 (the law that hoped to ban same-sex marriage). Being involved in the LGBT community is not uncommon for Google, but this is the biggest task it has taken on in the fight for equal rights.